8 - Skills and Progression

Summary

They keep trying to send you on the same courses … You’re like, ‘Mate, we’ve done all that’ … They’ve got a checklist of about 14, 15 courses, and they’re all pretty badly taught anyway … A one-day health and safety course; they will string it out for two weeks.

Universal Credit claimant, sanctions, support and service leavers project (Scullion et al. 2019)

The UK has a skills problem, but it is not a straightforward one. On the one hand, we have an oversupply of skills. According to the 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS), 19 per cent of respondents felt their skills were “much higher” and 33 per cent “a bit higher” than those required by their job (Sutherland 2013). The absence of good quality part-time jobs we highlighted earlier means that women in particular are often trapped in jobs for which they are overqualified. For example, a survey carried out in 2015 found that 52 per cent of retail workers feel overqualified for the work they do (Ussher 2016).

Recent research from academics at King's College London and Working Families (2021) has shown that a need to compromise on finding work that better aligns with people's skillsets, qualification levels and capabilities in order to access part-time/flexible jobs that allow them to fit around caring and other non-work needs means that many workers are trapped in low pay despite being highly skilled. People working in jobs where their skills are not being used earn less and have fewer opportunities for progression. They also have lower well-being, motivation and job satisfaction compared to workers with skills that are valued and put to use (Boxall et al. 2019).

There is also a problem with undervaluing people's skills. In some low-pay sectors such as social care, it is not the case that skills are being underused – rather, that they are undervalued. UK care workers are amongst the lowest paid in Western Europe, and the scale of underpayment across the sector means that many care workers are denied even minimum entitlements (Gardiner 2015). Recent legal battles for equal pay in retail, where certain roles, more likely to be carried out by women, have been undervalued compared to others, also show that undervaluing of skills is a common experience for many low-paid workers (Butler 2021).